'I have offered to give him fifty pounds--down--and to take this rough unlicked thing he calls a Play. If I find time I shall, perhaps, rewrite the whole, and put it on the stage. It will then, of course, be my own--my own, Effie. Good-bye, child. I have not forgotten our talk--or my promise--if we remain on friendly relations.' He went away. Effie sank into a chair. What she had done with her own work had never seemed to her half so terrible as what was now proposed to be done with her brother's work. She crept into his room. He sat with his head in his hands, most mournful of bards since the world began. 'Archie, I know--I know; he has told me. Oh! Archie--do you think it is true?' [Illustration: _'Archie, I know--I know.'_] 'He says so, Effie. He says it is worthless.' 'Yet he will give you fifty pounds.' 'That is to please you--for your sake. The thing is worthless--no manager would look at it.' 'Yet--fifty pounds! Why should Mr. Feilding give fifty pounds--a whole fifty pounds--for a worthless play? Archie, don't do it--don't let him have it; wait a little--we will ask somebody else. Oh! I could tell you something. Wait--tell him, if you must say anything, that you will think it over.' When Effie turned over the pages of the next number of _The Muses Nine_, she found, first of all, her own verses in the Editor's column with his name at the bottom. This sight, which had formerly made her so proud, now filled her with shame. The generous promise of the future failed to awaken in her any glow of hope. For the very words with which her only editor had beguiled her of her verses--the plea that they were worthless, and must be rewritten--he had used to her brother. And as her poems had never been rewritten, so would Archie's play, she felt sure, be presented without a single alteration, with the name of Mr. Alec Feilding as author. That week she took no verses to the studio-study. And a certain paragraph in the same columns perused by this suspicious young woman brought rage--nothing short of rage--into her heart. No! not her brother, as well as herself! It ran thus: 'I have always been under the impression that the dearth of good plays is due to nothing else in the world than the fact that the good men who ought to be writing them all run off into the domain of fiction. It is a pleasant country--that of Fable Land. I have been there, and I hope to go there again and make a long stay. But Play Land--that is also a pleasant country. I have been there lately, and I hope to demonstrate that a good play may still be produced in the English tongue--a good and original play. In short, I have written a romantic drama, of which all I can say at present is that it lies finished, in my fireproof safe, and that a certain actor-manager will probably play the title-rôle before many moons have waxed and waned.' 'No,' said Effie, crumpling up the paper. 'You have not got Archie's romantic drama yet.' CHAPTER VIII ALL ABOUT MYSELF